In July 2018, Demi Lovato was rushed to a Los Angeles hospital after a reported drug overdose. The medical emergency came after a documented substance addiction, and years later, it is still detrimentally impacting the singer’s health in a major way.
New YouTube documentary series Demi Lovato: Dancing with the Devil goes in depth to explore the dark period in the pop singer’s life. The newly released full length trailer for the project examines Lovato’s mindset at the time, revealing that she was in critical condition multiple times throughout her stay in the hospital; in the aftermath of the overdose, Lovato suffered three strokes and a heart attack, health crises that had irreversible side effects.
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"I was left with brain damage, and I still deal with the effects of that today. I don't drive a car, because I have blind spots on my vision," Lovato shared candidly at at the documentary's recent Television Critics Association panel. "And I also for a long time had a really hard time reading. It was a big deal when I was able to read out of a book, which was like two months later because my vision was so blurry."
Lovato has talked openly about the relapse that led up to the 2018 overdose, telling Ellen DeGeneres in 2020 that the near-fatal event coincided with her struggle with disordered eating. Now two years removed from the life-changing incident, she is still working through the repercussions and the numerous other issues she’s dealt in the past few years (including her brief but turbulent relationship with actor Max Ehrich). However, Lovato says, she wouldn’t change a thing about her experience because it ultimately set her on a better course.
“Everything had to happen in order for me to learn the lessons that I learned," she explained at the panel. "It was a painful journey, and I look back and sometimes I get sad when I think of the pain that I had to endure to overcome what I have, but I don't regret anything."
The upcoming YouTube original is Lovato’s third documentary after Stay Strong (2012) and Simply Complicated (2017), but she promises that it will be her most honest project yet. A press release for the docu-series says that Dancing with the Devil will "unearth [Lovato's] prior traumas and discovers the importance of her physical, emotional, and mental health." So she's really taking it there.
Demi Lovato: Dancing with the Devil premieres on YouTube on March 23, 2021.
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